Perils from the Sea

Mark Kozelek turns over all non-vocal responsibilities to the Album Leaf's Jimmy Lavalle on this collaboration, setting his ruminations on memory to Lavalle's subtle electronic pulses. The effect underscores Kozelek's lyrics with a new and more urgent desperation.

Has Mark Kozelek ever written a truer or more succinct description of his creative process than “Ceiling Gazing”? “Layin’ in my bed ceiling gazing/ Wide awake with jet lag from Australia,” he sings on the standout from Perils from the Sea, his new collaboration with Album Leaf founder Jimmy Lavalle. As a churchly organ repeats an insistently ascending phrase, Kozelek describes the stack of mail that awaited him after a tour, including “a wedding invitation from a new young relative I never even knew of.” The card sets his mind reeling around his family tree, until it alights on memories of his sister. She’s just suffered through a bad divorce and is raising two daughters, age four and seven; he wants to live a long life just so he can see how they grow up. It’s a quietly poignant song, one that subtly lays out the distance between Kozelek and his loved ones even as it tries to connect them in song. “Can’t stop my mind from racing,” he concludes. “It’s not good or bad, it’s just how God made me.”

Few songwriters can sketch a scene with Kozelek’s eye for detail or his economy of language, and fewer still can match the insight with which he can draw a character. In recent years, however, the sheer volume of work Kozelek has released through his Caldo Verde Records has tended to dilute the impact of his songs. Not even the most avid fan could keep up with the deluge of bonus discs and live albums, and musically he has narrowed his palette to a single instrument: that nylon-string guitar he introduced on Admiral Fell Promises. It makes more financial than aesthetic sense, as it allows him to keep touring expenses to a bare minimum, but those nylon strings have comes to define his sound both on stage and in the studio, collapsing his songs into one another.

That makes Perils from the Sea unique in Kozelek’s recent catalog. He mostly turns over all the non-vocal responsibilities to Lavalle, so instead of plucks and strums, we hear forlorn beeps and bloops-- somewhat more hushed than on the Album Leaf output, yet distinctively textured and tailored to Kozelek’s signature phrasings. Lavalle favors a subtle pulse and thrum that gently reinforces the concreteness of the details. On “Caroline”, the stuttering beat gooses the tempo a bit and gets Kozelek singing faster than usual. It’s another song that contrasts the securities of home (waking up next to his love and her rat terrier pup, hanging around familiar coffeeshops) with the lure of the road, yet the music lends the emotions a new and more urgent desperation. It may be Kozelek’s finest moment since anything off Ghosts of the Great Highway.

Kozelek writes songs by simply letting his mind wander, then spends years retracing his steps on stage. That his songs move by tangent and discursion can frustrate a listener since it means he tends to eschew choruses, bridges, hooks, and other structural embellishments. Instead, his songs are built almost exclusively from verses, and they often worry over a single, simple melody. When it works, as it does on “Ceiling Gazing”, that approach can locate immense symbolic power in even the most seemingly banal items: a scratched copy of Heart’s Dreamboat Annie that he and his sister played countless times, for example, or the lonely house in Ohio where she lives now.

Lavalle understands this, and he crafts beats to represent the mechanisms of memory. Only occasionally do they sound at cross-purposes. The psychedelic synths on “1936” sound too ominous and otherworldly for what is a pretty thin story centered around a special dime, and on “You Missed My Heart”, the burble of background noise cannot redeem a strained account of a murderer who kills-- and eventually dies-- for love. The sentiment is too clever to ring particularly true, which is on Kozelek’s shoulders, but Lavalle’s beats are too noncommittal to add much gravity or levity. Still, the effort is appreciated, if only because the song shows both men readily moving out of their comfort zones. Perils from the Sea may not be a seamless collaboration, but neither artist has sounded so purposeful in his reverie in years.